An American Interregnum: The Collapse of Neoliberalism and the Rise of MAGA

The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci described the interregnum as the dangerous interval when an old order has lost its authority and no new one has taken its place, a time when "a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." An American Interregnum argues that the United States entered exactly such an interval in 2008, when the financial crisis broke the authority of the neoliberal order that had governed the country since 1980, and that we are living in it still.Robert McLemore traces the long unraveling across nearly two decades: the asymmetric rescue that saved the banks and left ordinary households behind, the Tea Party and Occupy, the 2016 insurgency, the pandemic, the reckoning after January 6, and the institutional restructuring of a second Trump term. He sets the American story inside the global pattern of populist movements, from Hungary and Turkey to Brexit, and asks the question the daily coverage cannot: if the old order is finished, what could replace it?This is not a book of vindication for either side. Where the evidence allows a judgment, the author makes one; where it does not, he says so. He takes the grievances that built MAGA seriously without flinching from the findings about racial coding, institutional strain, and democratic risk that the evidence supports. The result is a rigorous and accessible diagnosis of a nation arguing with itself about who belongs and where it is going.Written from Acadiana in south Louisiana rather than the coastal centers of commentary, by an author who has lived among the people the book describes, An American Interregnum offers a serious account of the American crisis in its full complexity and its real costs. Read more